My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say - touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.

I am a moralist. I worry.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.